This was a truth
perceived and universally acknowledged at the 61st Venice Film Festival,
where 2004’s most revealing and bewitching one-to-one contest was between Hayao Miyazaki's HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE and JiaZhangke's THE WORLD.

Two fantasyland
visions. One from Japan, one from China.

One from an aging lion
who has seen the last twilight of empire, the other from a tiger economy
spying new dominions in the streaks of a fresh dawn. One from a veteran
animator hewing to handcrafted traditions, the other from a Sixth Generation
youngster hewing Sino-realism into new shapes.

Miyazaki's HOWL'S
MOVING CASTLE, like his SPIRITED AWAY with its setting in an abandoned theme
park, finds a tragic grandeur in the decay of fantasy. His film is captivated
by the speed with which innocence turns to disenchantment and back again, by
the spooky interchangeability of old crones and young women, of old warriors
and young princes.

Zhangke's THE WORLD sees the
theme park in which it is set, a fabricated global fantasyland, as a symbol
of his nation's ambition. His China collects other
countries like a headhunter, shrinking them down to a miniature Paris here, a Rome here, a New York there. "The twin
towers were bombed on September 11th 2001, but we still have
them," says a guide, pointing to the two look-alike scale-model
monoliths. Says a sign nearby: "See the world without ever leaving Beijing." Says another:
"We'll show you the world in a day."

Miyazaki is too old to be
cynical, though full of foreboding. Zhangke is too
young not to be fashionably cynical, though fascinated by the very pretensions
and presumptions he satirizes.

The veteran Japanese,
who put traditional animation back on the international map with PRINCESS
MONONOKE, is all-accepting. The paint-and-brush techniques in HOWL'S MOVING
CASTLE are as old as Disney. The ghosts of SNOW WHITE and FANTASIA move
through its tale of a girl's friendship with a moving, clanking, breathing,
puffing fortress. Miyazaki takes these arts to
new extremes of comical or poetic expressionism. But where a young artist
might do this rebelliously - believing the old ways are fatigued - the
60-year-old does it through love of the heritage he has received and
embraced. There are no kitschy ironies placed like quotation marks around the
wicked witch, the hopping scarecrow, the talking hearth-fire, the magical doorknob
whose different turns change the very view outside the gingerbread street
house of early scenes.

Zhangke - Yang to Miyazaki's Yin - is nothing
but irony. He bombards what he sees as ersatz with missionary derision.
Manufactured fantasy, THE WORLD argues, is a canker from the old world, from
the western and so-called developed world. The new China has cravenly espoused
the theme park as proof of its membership of the elite. It invites outsiders
in so they can gasp at how China has 'captured' like
spoils these exotic, historic cities. Venice itself is here, just around the
corner from Ulan Bator.

When Zhangke uses animation it is with sarcastic zest. He even
deploys little cartoons. Sometimes they are mock-promos to hymn the joys of
this ride or that attraction. Sometimes they take off from almost nothing,
just a text message sent between characters. They are all like advertising
spots, though, complete with jingles: born of a designing culture that wants
you to buy what you don't want to buy, to dream what you are commanded to
dream.

THE WORLD is about a
culture of obedience that is modulating from Maoism to market capitalism.
HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE is about a culture celebrating old freedoms, old
anarchies, that have somehow risen again - and will keep rising - out of the
battered machinery of dynastic and imperial tyranny. Miyazaki's castle is like an
old warrior that has accreted organically the very paraphernalia and power
symbols that once defined his life. (Two cannons for eyes etc.) Unlike the
ordered, programmed eclecticism of Zhangke's theme
park, HOWL's ambulant fortress cannot control its
growth or select its accessories. It is in the all-powerful grip of fate,
karma, history, as abstract as a hurricane, as surreal as an earthquake.

Which is the wiser,
truer vision? Or is it different takes for different states? JiaZhangke may well believe
that China can be arranged and disposed like an amusement park, that its
people really are gullible visitors or exploitable workers, forced to promote
the ideal symbol of their nation: a consumer franchise that has consumed
other countries! Planet China!

But for all the acuity
of THE WORLD, one feels the movie slowly become its own message; that it is
ultimately as finite, as closed as the self-dooming lebensraum it sees in China's attempt at a
far-reaching vision. Zhangke extracts early magic
from the power of people to fantasize and dream in their turnstile Toylands - to walk from Italy to Mongolia as they would
from a city block to a city block - but then slowly, grindingly condemns it.

The Japanese filmmaker
sees ruin, war and terror everywhere: he has lived through them. He sees them
even in landscapes trodden by princes and pet scarecrows. But there lies the
salvation. His heart and belief are with the princes and pet scarecrows.

For Miyazaki the last great fact
of existence is recurrence. Eternal destruction, eternalrenewal.
His
characters and living objects keep changing shape, keep being reborn, even as
apocalypse rains or Armageddon’s flame. (The fire-bombing scenes in HOWL'S
MOVING CASTLE seem plucked from real history. They could be London, Dresden or Tokyo). When the clumsy,
foolhardy, bragging, lovable castle of the title finally collapses in a heap
after the climactic battle, we discover that there is no 'finally'. A new
mini-castle emerges, dancing along into a new future.

JiaZhangke
might think this was decadent sentimentality. His own film is devoted to the
perfidies of fantasy, facile optimism and blue-skies thinking. But THE WORLD's belief in ephemerality
as the writing in the sky is ultimately the reason why it, too, seems a
little ephemeral. It goes nowhere by telling us there is nowhere to go. By
contrast Miyazaki's film, as its title
suggests, is about movement, and about a world where even the monumental and
seemingly unbudgeable has the power of motion.
While there is change there is life. And there always is change. It is the
banner benediction of good times and the redeeming mercy of existence in bad
times.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.